Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • Nokia N950

    Nokia N950 origins

    The Nokia N950 was designed at a weird time. Nokia’s position as the premier smartphone maker was under siege from Android and iPhone after seeing off the Palm OS and numerous iterations of Windows Phone. Nokia had missed the boat on devices with capacitive touch displays. It was using a smartphone operating system that was starting to show its age, a bit like PalmOS did previously. Like Palm, Nokia wasted far too much time coming up with its next generation OS, which gave Google and Apple the opportunity gap that they needed.

    Part of the problem was that Nokia was wrong for the right reasons:

    • Different consumers do need different types of phones, which is why HMD have managed to resurrect modern versions of classic Nokia feature phone designs
    • Phones are better if they can be operated one-handed. Whereas Google and Apple busied themselves designing computers that happened to be phones
    • Phones needed to be made down to a cost. So the handsets were different on the outside but had common ‘guts’, which meant that premium products could  be underpowered

    Nokia had their own answer to Android and iOS in MeeGo which grew out of work that Intel and Nokia had separately done on mobile Linux. Nokia was partnering with Intel partly because it believed that Intel was the future of mobile.

    The Nokia N950 was a development handset showcasing this operating system in action. It was similar and related to the N9.

    The N9 was released in a limited amount of markets were it was successful. However the N9 success story was overshadowed by the larger business problems Nokia faced in its transition from Symbian and feature phones to Windows Phone.

    There were an estimated 5,000 Nokia N950 handsets made in total, which went to the Nokia global developer community. Technically there are loaned devices rather than given to developers. They occasionally appear on eBay going for 1,000GBP+

    Up close with the Nokia N950

    At first glance the Nokia N950 looked like a chimera of the N9 and the N8 with a slide out keyboard riffing on the Communicator form factor that Nokia pioneered.

    It makes sense to list the differences with the N9 first of all:

    • The Nokia N950 had a TFT LCD screen roughly the same size as a Nokia E90 Communicator, but with a higher resolution. The N9 had an AMOLED screen which is slightly smaller and has a slightly higher resolution
    • The N9 was made from the same machined polycarbonate body that then made its appearance on Nokia Lumia models. The Nokia N950 has a case made from a mix of machined and stamped aluminium parts and came only in black (though I have seen pictures of un-anodised devices as well. These were probably pre-production prototypes)
    • They had different camera modules that performed broadly the same
    • The Nokia N950 had a pop under keyboard similar to  the N8 and E7. More on that a bit later on
    • The Nokia N950 had 8.5GB of usable storage compared to up to 64GB of memory in the N9
    • The N9 has a slightly larger battery than the N950, but the difference wouldn’t have been noticeable due to the difference in screen technology

    What you end up with is a phone that still looks modern (partly due to its anodised black case making the screen edge harder to spot.

    Nokia N950

    The device is slow compared to modern devices but is speedy for its time. The device flipped from landscape to portrait mode, but this wasn’t perfectly implemented.

    Nokia N950

    It had a pop under keyboard which allows the device to have a really shallow design in comparison to Communicator devices. However it does leave the screen exposed to damage. The past decade of Gorilla Glass™ screens on iPhones and Android handsets proves that the Corning wonder material is not invulnerable.

    Nokia N950

    The problem with the design means that you end up with a shallow area for the keyboard. The Nokia N950 like the E7 and N8 don’t have as full a featured keyboard as the Communicator devices.

    10 - E90 keyboard

    Here’s a keyboard from the E90 by comparison. When you were using the Nokia N950 you end up with a virtual keyboard on the screen  providing the tab,  ctrl, esc and alt keys, as well as very commonly used symbols.  Which begs the question of how useful the keyboard would really be for developers?

    Compared to the modern iPhone, the N950 meets the goal of a mobile computing device much better. You can write longer emails and documents on the keyboard than the iPhone. The camera is adequate for most people’s needs and it shows in some respects how little the smartphone concept has moved on over the past seven years.

    Could the Nokia N950 been the future?

    Historically Nokia’s Symbian phones had been built on TI’s OMAP processors; but these didn’t have a roadmap for 4G wireless. Nokia had two choices bet on Qualcomm or Intel. Qualcomm had come out on top in IP related disputes, which probably made Intel seem more attractive. Intel was also championing WiMax as a 4G standard.

    WiMax had limited adoption at best, Nokia was on the wrong side of networking standards and eventually was forced to use Qualcomm processors in Windows Phone reference designs.

    `Nokia could have gone to Snapdragon processors but its joint relationship with Intel on the software side of things would have been tainted. There is also no guarantee that Qualcomm would have been a helpful partner given the history between the two companies and that both Android and iOS devices used Qualcomm products.

    Secondly, Nokia bet all the marketing budget on the Lumia device launch which left nothing for the MeeGo devices.

    Finally, Nokia would not have been able to get out of the legal contract that they had with Microsoft. The only way MeeGo would have stood a chance is if the Nokia board had not approved Stephen Elop’s proposal to go with Windows, rival schemes to go with Android and bet on the home team.

    • At the time the internal Nokia option would have looked high risk. Board members would have been familiar with historic project problems on Meamo and then MeeGo
    • Secondly Nokia had a history of buying in new generation operating systems. It licensed GEOS  for the Nokia Communicator 9000 and 9110. It licensed and then bought into Psion’s OS business unit, which became Symbian
    • Nokia’s feature phones ran on homegrown technology built on Intelligent System Architecture (ISA), also called the Nokia Operating System (NOS)
    More information

    TIMELINE: Qualcomm vs Nokia patents battle | Reuters
    Qualcomm loses GSM patent fight with Nokia in German court | Ars Technica
    Why Qualcomm Folded to Nokia | Bloomberg BusinessWeek (paywall)
    The ‘I Wish I Had Known This’ List about 101 Things Wrong With Windows Phone Smartphones Like Nokia Lumia | Communities Dominate Brands
    How Many Lumia Sales? As Nokia (and Microsoft) ashamed to reveal number, lets count – and compare to N9 MeeGo sales | Communities Dominate Brands
    Nokia N8 review | GSMArena

  • iPhone Xs launch

    Random notes as I watched the iPhone Xs, iPhone XR and Apple Watch Series 4 launch.

    Phil Schiller

    Watching the introductory clip, this felt like an event designed mostly for an internal audience. The events have become a parody of themselves with very well worn tropes.

    Company and eco-system update

    • Apple stores: 500,000,000 visitors per year. The stores have free wi-fi and classes, so this isn’t just about purchasing or building loyalty with customers. It has become public private space.
    • 2 billion iOS devices – many users will have replaced at least three devices so the community of likely iOS users is probably closer to 600 million. iPad tend to end up being communal devices in family homes and so have a longer life.
    • Apple Watch is the number one watch – I found this clip suprising. I find that hard to believe given the ubiquity of the Casio G-Shock range, or the F-91W family of basic digital watches

    Apple Watch series 4

    It is clever in some of the engineering: mass producing a ceramic back. the way Apple has managed to squeeze an ECG function in there. But there is a lot not to like about the watch
    The case design preportions seem off in the video, it may look better in real life. I am guessing that part of the move is about the cellular aerial, but then you have the ceramic back

    • They still haven’t sorted the crown positioning and protection – it will still fire up Siri for no apparent reason
    • The device is only minimally waterproof
    • The awful information design in the face used on Apple Watch hero images

    apple-watch-series4_watch-front-training_09122018
    Which got me rooting through old copies of Wired magazine. They used to have a ‘Future of’ section on the back inside cover. And lone behold
    watch

    iPhone Xs

    I was really unimpressed by the iPhone Xs. Don’t get me wrong it looks ‘nice’ and takes a lot of engineering. There isn’t an upgrade reason for X users. I find the AR applications are gimmicks rather than necessarily being regularly used apps. The notable exception would be the measuring tape app included in iOS 12

    Screen pixel counts are now getting ridiculous – you won’t be able to see the difference in terms of pixel refinement. Contrast may improve in HDR.

    The sound on the device doesn’t recognise that consumers use headphones. It was all about louder speakers.

    For iPhone 6/7/8 users the battery life descriptions for the new iPhone Xs devices were weasel language that would make me be wary of upgrading on this cycle.

    Facial recognition but no in screen biometric touch sensor means that you still have a notch. It also means that there is a dissonance in experience between the touch sensors on the latest MacBook Pro models and iPad models. How will Apple be handling websites that have integrated Apple Pay validation?

    As a MacBook Pro user, this told me to hang on to my current device. Wait and see if Apple changes the authentication again on the next round.

    A12 Bionic chip. 20 years ago five trillion instructions per second would have been impressive as this would have been a super computer. Now it is pretty much in line with what one would expect in Moore’s Law. Intel are squeezing double the rate fo computing power out of FPGAs. You’ve got all that power and you get animojis…

    How the software handles the paralellism of the chip is key. That is something that Sony found in the Cell architecture of the Playstation 2. Don’t expect that power to be obvious in 3rd party applications. The addressable memory claim surprised me. Its a 64 bit processor, so of course it could address 512GB of memory.

    • How much of the A12 chip is required to get FaceID to work?
    • How will the software get the most out of the cores?
    • There isn’t modem integration which helps rivals with their circuit board designs.

    iPhone camera ‘breakthroughs’ seem to come from intellectual property that Lytro developed?

    Dual SIMs – it is definitely a minority interest. It is likely to annoy carriers in mature markets with the exception of challengers like T-Mobile US.

    The SIMs are all non-standard formats which is a pain in the backside. eSIMs are only supported by EE and Vodafone in the UK. The nano-SIM is yet another smaller format of SIM which will be hard to sell to carriers. The most attractive model is the China market one with two physical SIMs.

    This could be:

    • Because China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom wouldn’t get on board with eSIMs
    • To screw with the Chinese grey market for iPhones (which is on the decline anyway
    • An unfortunate side effect is that it makes the China models more desirable for a (minority) consumer like me. So the grey market is likely to go the other way

    iPhones are coming with a USB rather than USB C cable in the box, which raises questions about the longer term commitment to Thunderbolt 3…

    iPhone Xr

    Why did Apple create so many colour versions. It has too many colour variations. One of Apple’s historic strengths has been keeping a tight leash on the product portfolio.

    More Apple related content here.

  • The Internet of Stupid Things

    The internet of stupid things is a more charitable phrase for what many consumers call the Internet of Shit. Yes lots of products can be internet enabled, but should they be? There is a mix of challenges that result in products which fall into the following two categories:

    • Products that are internet enabled but shouldn’t be – the Happy Fork or the Griffin Smart Toaster being classic examples. I found the Griffin Smart Toaster particularly disappointing as the company’s products such as the PowerMate are generally really good. It doesn’t take the greatest imagination to see how a smart toaster could even be hacked; causing a fire – hence the internet of stupid things. Why do household appliances really need to be attached to technology. Teasmades woke you up and made a mug of tea for you to have first thing. This was a product that reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s – well before cloud services.
    • Products that would be benefit from tech, but shouldn’t rely on the the cloud. I’d argue that Nest would fit in this category where cloud outages could have serious impacts on the consumer. American Nest customers have had some hard winter nights when their Nest control system went down due to cloud outages. There was no off-cloud or manual control mode that the Nest devices could take advantage of.

    It is interesting to see that Li & Fung (who are famous for global supply chain management provided to western brands and retailers) are involved in this video. It is also interesting that they are taking such a proactive view on experience design education.

    The qualitative design research Li & Fung did on skiing wearables for a client – made me wonder what value do Li & Fung’s clients bring to the table. More on design here.

  • H1, 2018 most popular posts

    Happy Back to the Future Day

    I took a little bit of time to reflect on the content that I have been writing, what can I learn from it and how I can reuse these learnings? Specifically what are people finding of interest? This couldn’t happen without people actually reading the content, so thank you for reading; feel free to come back on a regular basis. Over the past six months readers like you have found the following articles of most interest. In reverse order

    Reuse, Re-edit, Remix and Recycle – if you read the industry publications we here about personalised ad creative driven by ad targeting. But often the core creative and is created unnecessarily. Instead, what’s the minimum viable creative tweak that can be used? How do we extend the smart processes of reuse, re-edit, remix and recycling into this world?

    This Wasn’t The Internet We Envisaged – in the word’s of Terry Pratchet:

    “If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”

    So it was time for reflection in order to get a perspective as the regulators and media discovered Facebook, Google and Amazon where not models of virtuous conduct.

    The Biggest Public Relations Agencies Stuckness and Market Dynamics – The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

    This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness.

    Throwback Gadget: Bose Wave System – usually my gadget reviews tend to be some of the better performing content. The Bose Wave review was the only one that appears this time around.

    Social Networks 10 Years Ago – a reflection on what a more diverse social media eco-system looked like.

    The Advertising Industry Post – the macro effects buffeting the world’s largest marketing services conglomerates.

    Mercedes China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama

    Personal online brand – at a time when we’re seeing social media turning into walled gardens. David Gallagher asked the Twitterverse if he should have his own site?

    Twitterverse: @wadds says I need a proper blog. I say I can do it on LinkedIn or Facebook. What say you? Build my own?

    I weighed in on why he should and how I manage the process.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – Winston Sterzel did a good video for the average bystander on the Chinese smartphone eco-system. I thought it was a good film to share with marketers  – with a bit more background information answering some of the ‘why’ in terms of market dynamics.

    App constellations 2018  research – I built on work that I had done in 2014 and 2016, comparing the rate of growth across different companies apps based on Fred Wilson’s definition of app constellations. This was also the post that took me the longest to research!

    SaveSave

  • Malayan emergency + more things

    Psychological Warfare of the Malayan Emergency – interesting read; I wonder what C.C. Too would have made of the Leave and Remain campaigns? It is amazing how much of things in the UK goes back to Borneo and the Malayan emergency. The COIN strategies that were successful in the Malayan emergency were applied time and time again

    Reliance Jio has become the world leader in feature phones in just 10 months — Quartz – The strong growth in Jio, clubbed with the return of the Nokia brand, has helped the global feature phone market grow 38% year-on-year in January-March 2018, Counterpoint said. India contributed to nearly 43% of all feature phone sales during the first three months of 2018.

    Highlights from CCS Insight’s Predictions – Manufacturers’ vision for smart TVs fails. Despite their efforts to introduce apps and smart features, makers of smart TVs have failed to convince customers, who still use them as “dumb” screens. They buy TVs mainly based on design and picture quality, viewing the smartness only as a by-product. – More consumer behaviour related content here.

    The Bill Gates Line – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – interesting essay on the nature of monopoly power, platforms and aggregators

    Microsoft and Publicis unveil Marcel, an AI-based productivity platform for the ad giant | TechCrunch – interesting narrow expert apps rather than a general intelligence

    Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 710 platform in mobile AI, neural networking push | ZDNet – further enhancing neural networks on smartphones

    New Sony CEO to Detail Shift Away From Gadgets in Mid-Term Plan – Bloomberg – huge implication for innovation though

    US-China tech wars threaten global sector disruption | FT – strikes at the heart of China’s ambitions and is likely to curb revenues as well as disrupt supply chains at foreign multinationals, many of which see the country as a key market. But it is also prompting a rethink at the corporate level in China, with tech companies looking to develop their own chips (pay wall)

    Is Douyin the Right Social Video Platform for Luxury Brands? | Jing Daily – Douyin insider Fabian Bern shared that 85 percent of the app’s users are under 24 years old, over 70 percent are female, and the majority are from upper class families living in first tier cities

    Social credit system must bankrupt discredited people: former official – Global Times – China’s social credit system had blocked more than 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips by the end of April.

    An improved social credit system was needed so that “discredited people become bankrupt,” Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council

    Opinion | What the Microsoft Antitrust Case Taught Us – The New York Times – interesting how what would have isolated sporadic criticism of the big four internet giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google is now morphing into criticism and calls for remedy on a regular basis. Behavioural change from a marketing perspective is usually driven by reach and repetition. It feels like the ground is being prepared for legislation or a court challenge a few years from now

    A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard | Bloomberg Professional Services – really interesting evolution of design

    The surprising return of the repo man – The Washington Post – “So much of America is just a heartbeat away from a repossession — even good people, decent people who aren’t deadbeats,” said Patrick Altes, a veteran agent in Daytona Beach, Fla. “It seems like a different environment than it’s ever been.”

    How Judea Pearl Became One of AI’s Sharpest Critics – The Atlantic – Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial-intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria. In 2011 Pearl won the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor, in large part for this work.

    But as Pearl sees it, the field of AI got mired in probabilistic associations. These days, headlines tout the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks. We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently.